The Permaculture Workshop

16-11-09
My time in Pucara didn’t go exactly as planned. I started off teaching in the school, but didn’t like it. First of all, they didn’t need me. They had two teachers (for around 30 kids, aged 6-13) as well as a music, art, and gym teacher who came in once a week for specific classes, and another volunteer who had been there since June teaching English and helping with classes. I was utterly useless. Moreover, the week I started was the week of their exams, so I spent 5 days standing around watching the children cheat on their tests. The next two weeks were vacation, and I was out of a job.

Fortunately, I met Peter, an ex-Vermonter who has been living here for 11 years working with the people of Pucará and other villages on sustainable development projects through his NGO and, as if in answer to my prayers, he invited me to join a permaculture workshop he had organized. It was perfect. The workshop was three days per week for three weeks, taught by a Guatemalan permaculture expert and attended by Ecuadorian organic farmers who wanted to know more about this permaculture thing. (Permaculture, if you don't know yourself, is basically sustainable organic agriculture, working with and from nature, instead of against it). I had so much fun, and learned so much.

For example: the “border effect” is really useful – if, instead of thinking of a border as dividing, you think of it as uniting two different areas, you can take advantage of the diversity created there (i.e. at the foot of a mountain, you find mountain birds, valley birds, and some birds that only live in that niche). So when planning a garden, make as many borders as possible – canals, paths, etc. – and make them as curvy as possible: when have you ever seen a straight line in nature? That also uses space better- you can plant more carrots in a wavy line than a straight one. And the more carrots, the better.

Or: agriculture should work in harmony with the lunar cycle. When the moon is waxing, energy and fluids in plants move upwards, while when it wanes, the energy sinks. So always plant seeds with the waxing moon – so it will create shoots – but transplant with the waning moon – so it develops roots.

Or: many times you can get nature to do your work for you. E.g. if you have chickens (and everyone here does) put them in an empty vegetable bed and they will clean it of seeds and insects while tilling the soil and fertilizing it with their nutrient-filled manure, and - voilá! You can plant in it again without having to do any of that yourself.

I don’t know about you, but I found it fascinating. We generally spent our mornings learning the theory behind permaculture, its principles and methods, and the afternoons putting them into practice: like making a circle of banana trees around a hole filled with branches and leaves to filter and use the “gray water” from the laundry/kitchen areas – every year you get a meter and a half of good compost, 21 bunches of bananas, and someplace to drain your dishwater. We also made ditches in the hill to collect rainwater and direct it into the soil, mandala gardens, and a seeding area. It was great fun.

The only problem was that many of the things I learned – like how to make a sustainable coffee forest with bananas and citrus trees to give shade – aren’t really applicable to Vermont. I was suddenly faced with how very unsustainable our life in New England is; everything we eat, even in the summer, is transported from California or farther. And even if we turn the field behind our house into a fully functional, diversified permaculture garden and canned and stored everything, we could still only produce a fraction of what we consume in a year. It almost makes one want to up and move down to the tropics where you can plant a lemon tree outside your kitchen window and never more have to worry about zest. Sure, these people don’t even have a word for “sledding”, but they’re a heck of a lot closer to sustainability than we will ever be. And they have really good fruit.  (Tangent alert!) My two favorite fruits right now are Guavas – like a huge (2 ft long) bean pod filled with shiny black seeds covered in a layer of soft white fuzz, you eat the fuzz and spit the seeds on the ground, hoping to plant a new tree – and Grenedillas – perhaps so named because they look like grenades, they’re a yellow fruit that has a hard shell you crack open to reveal hundreds of small seeds covered in clear, sweet pouches of juice, sort of like a pomegranate but better – I’m going to miss them when I leave here.

Oh, by the way, my plans have changed and I’m now not going to Colombia but straight to the Amazon and on into Peru, so if you never hear from me again, I was probably eaten by an anaconda or a jaguar or a school of piranhas or any of the other amazingly lethal things they have in the jungle. It’s going to be so exciting, hooray! :D